Tag: Pillar

Last week I attended an event announcing the forthcoming launch of a new fitness app called Pillar. It offers combined training and nutrition advice to help athletes achieve their goals. Pillar is backed by a strong scientific team including Professor James Morton, Team Sky Head of Performance Nutrition, and Professor Graeme Close, England Rugby Head of Performance Nutrition.

James Morton gave a fascinating presentation about the periodisation of carbohydrate (CHO) fuelling, including a detailed description of the nutrition strategy he created to support Chris Froome’s famous 80km attack on stage 19 of the 2018 Giro d’Italia. His recent paper explains the underlying science. These are some of the key points.

Always go into competition fully fuelled with carbohydrate

Well-fuelled athletes perform for longer at higher intensities than those with depleted reserves

Basic biochemistry: fat burning is too slow and supplies of the phosphocreatine are too small to sustain intensities over 85% of VO2max

A lighter evening meal on day 1 prepares to “sleep low, train low” ahead of a lower intensity session on day 2

Carbohydrate intake rises after exercise on day 2 in anticipation of a high intensity session on day 3

Fuelling is moderated on the evening of day 3 as day 4 is assigned as a recovery day

Carbohydrate rises later on day 4 to prepare for the next block of training

The Pillar app aims to provide these leading edge scientific principles to amateur cyclists and other athletes

In order to put this into action, you need to know how much carbohydrate you are consuming. My assumption has been that my diet is reasonably healthy, but I have never actually measured it. So I have been experimenting with free app MyFitnessPal that can be downloaded onto your phone. This provides a simple and convenient way to track the nutritional composition of your diet, including a barcode scanner that recognises most foods. You can link it to other apps such as Training Peaks to take account of energy expended. However, neither of these tools plans nutrition aheadof training sessions. Pillar aims to fill this gap. It will be interesting to see whether this turns out to be successful.